Your heart races. Your hands shake. Your stomach drops. And only after these physical sensations flood your system do you realize what triggered them. If you’ve experienced complex trauma, you know this sequence all too well—your body responding to danger before your conscious mind has even registered a threat. This isn’t a flaw in your system. It’s actually your nervous system doing exactly what it evolved to do: protect you from harm through a process that happens outside your conscious awareness.
Your body reacts before your mind during triggers because your nervous system constantly scans for danger through a subconscious process called neuroception. This automatic threat-detection system, located in primitive parts of your brain, evaluates safety and risk without requiring conscious thought. When your nervous system detects cues that resemble past trauma—whether that’s a tone of voice, a certain smell, or even low-frequency sounds—it immediately initiates protective responses like increased heart rate, shallow breathing, or muscle tension (Porges, 2022). For those living with complex PTSD, this system can become hypersensitive, perceiving threats even in objectively safe situations and leaving you feeling confused about why your body won’t calm down.
The Neuroscience Behind Body-First Responses
Your nervous system operates on a hierarchy of responses that developed over millions of years of evolution. The newest part of this system helps you feel safe, communicate, and connect with others. But when that social engagement system detects danger, it steps aside to allow more primitive survival responses to take over.
This isn’t a conscious decision. Research shows that approximately 80% of nerve signals travel from your body to your brain, while only 20% go from brain to body (Haeyen, 2024). Your body is continuously sending information upward about your internal state, and your brain then creates a story to make sense of these physical sensations.
The problem emerges when your nervous system has been shaped by prolonged or repeated trauma. What researchers call “faulty neuroception” can develop—where your body struggles to accurately distinguish between actual danger and safe situations. You might find yourself in a perfectly safe environment, consciously knowing there’s no threat, yet your body remains locked in a defensive state with racing heart, tense muscles, and hypervigilance.
For individuals with complex PTSD, this disconnect between conscious understanding and bodily response becomes a daily challenge. Your mind might tell you “I’m safe now,” while your body screams the opposite message.
Why Complex Trauma Gets Stored in the Body
Unlike single-incident trauma, complex PTSD typically develops from prolonged exposure to threatening situations—childhood abuse, domestic violence, military combat, or healthcare settings where you witness ongoing suffering. This extended trauma exposure fundamentally changes how your nervous system operates.
Trauma doesn’t just create memories in your mind; it becomes encoded in your muscles, organs, and nervous system. When a traumatic event occurs, your body prepares to fight or flee. But if you couldn’t complete those protective actions—perhaps you froze, or circumstances prevented escape—that mobilized energy can remain trapped in your body.
Think of it like a car with the gas pedal pressed while the brake is also engaged. Your system is revved up with nowhere to go. This incomplete defensive response can manifest years later as chronic muscle tension, digestive issues, or an exaggerated startle response. Your body remembers the threat even when your conscious mind has moved on.
Somatic Experiencing research demonstrates that trauma treatment must address these physical sensations, not just the narrative of what happened (Brom et al., 2017). The body-oriented therapeutic approach treats post-traumatic symptoms by helping you change the interoceptive and proprioceptive sensations—your awareness of internal body states and position in space—that remain associated with the traumatic experience.
The Window of Tolerance and Trauma Triggers
Every person has what therapists call a “window of tolerance”—an optimal zone where you can handle stress and challenges effectively. Within this window, you feel relatively calm, can think clearly, and respond to situations with flexibility.
Chronic trauma narrows this window significantly. Small stressors that others might barely notice can push you outside your zone of tolerance. When you’re above the window, you experience hyperarousal: anxiety, panic, racing thoughts, and that sensation of being “revved up” with no off switch. When you drop below the window, you experience hypoarousal: numbness, disconnection, brain fog, and exhaustion.
Your body learns to associate certain cues with being outside this window of safety. A raised voice might instantly catapult you into hyperarousal because it resembles past threatening situations. Conversely, feeling trapped in a situation might trigger a shutdown response—that dorsal vagal state where your body essentially plays dead to survive.
What makes this particularly challenging with complex PTSD is that triggers can be subtle and cumulative. It’s not always one obvious reminder of trauma. Sometimes it’s the accumulation of small stressors—a busy week, poor sleep, a tense conversation—that gradually pushes you toward the edge of your window. Then a seemingly minor event becomes the tipping point that sends your nervous system into a full protective response.
Understanding Somatic Symptoms of Triggered States
When your body reacts before your mind, it manifests through specific physical sensations. Learning to recognize these somatic markers helps you understand what’s happening in real-time.
Common body-first trauma responses include: chest tightness or difficulty breathing, stomach churning or nausea, temperature changes (sudden sweating or feeling cold), muscle tension especially in jaw, shoulders, or back, trembling or shaking, dizziness or feeling ungrounded, and heart pounding or racing.
These aren’t imagined symptoms or signs of weakness. They’re measurable physiological changes initiated by your autonomic nervous system’s assessment of threat. Your blood pressure shifts, stress hormones flood your system, and blood flow redirects to major muscle groups—all preparing you to fight or flee from danger that may no longer be present.
Healthcare workers and first responders, who comprise a significant portion of those seeking treatment for complex trauma in Idaho, often describe these sensations with particular intensity. Years of exposure to others’ suffering, combined with the pressure to remain composed, can create a profound disconnection between what your body experiences and what you allow yourself to consciously acknowledge.
At Boise Ketamine Clinic, practitioners with specialized training in somatic approaches—including Somatic Experiencing and transpersonal psychology—work specifically with these body-based manifestations of trauma. Marisa Radha Weppner, a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner with over 20 years of experience facilitating transformation, helps clients develop awareness of these physical sensations as a pathway to healing rather than something to fear or suppress.
Why Talk Therapy Alone Often Isn’t Enough
If you’ve spent years in traditional talk therapy discussing your trauma without experiencing lasting relief, you’re not alone. While cognitive approaches have value, they primarily engage the newer, thinking parts of your brain—the areas involved in language and conscious reasoning.
But trauma lives in older, more primitive brain regions that don’t speak the language of words. The amygdala, hippocampus, and brainstem—the areas that drive your body-first responses—operate below the level of conscious verbal processing. You can understand intellectually that you’re safe, you can articulate what happened and why it wasn’t your fault, yet your body continues to respond as if danger is imminent.
Research on body-oriented trauma therapy shows that addressing the interoceptive and proprioceptive dimensions of trauma—the felt sense of sensation in your body—creates a different kind of healing (Kuhfuß et al., 2021). This doesn’t mean talk therapy is worthless; rather, it suggests that comprehensive trauma treatment needs to include both top-down approaches (working with thoughts and understanding) and bottom-up approaches (working directly with bodily sensations and nervous system states).
This understanding drove the founding of Boise Ketamine Clinic over eight years ago. After losing a loved one to suicide, founder Nykol Bailey Rice—who holds credentials as both a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist and Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner—sought treatments that could address the full spectrum of trauma’s impact. Her discovery of research showing ketamine’s ability to promote neuroplasticity, combined with training through the Integrative Psychiatry Institute on working with non-ordinary states of consciousness, led to the clinic’s integrative model.
The Role of Neuroplasticity in Body-Based Healing
Your nervous system’s learned responses to trauma aren’t permanent. The brain possesses remarkable neuroplasticity—the ability to form new neural connections and modify existing ones throughout your lifetime.
Body-based trauma approaches leverage this neuroplasticity by creating new experiences of safety at a physiological level. When you work with a practitioner trained in somatic methods, you’re not trying to change your thoughts about the trauma. Instead, you’re providing your nervous system with corrective experiences—moments where your body can complete protective responses that were interrupted, or where you experience genuine physiological safety, perhaps for the first time in years.
Ketamine therapy has emerged as a particularly powerful tool in promoting this neural healing. By modulating glutamate, the brain’s primary excitatory neurotransmitter, ketamine helps restore balance to neural pathways involved in trauma responses while simultaneously promoting the growth of new neural connections. This neuroplasticity effect can help your nervous system learn that you’re no longer in danger, creating physiological changes that support emotional healing.
The integration of ketamine treatment with somatic awareness creates a unique opportunity. In the altered state that ketamine facilitates, you may access trauma material while maintaining enough distance to avoid re-traumatization. With the support of trained practitioners—including prescribers, registered nurses, and therapists working together—you can process these experiences while your nervous system remains regulated.
Creating New Patterns Through Somatic Awareness
Healing from complex trauma requires developing a different relationship with your body’s signals. Rather than viewing these physical responses as problems to eliminate, somatic approaches teach you to work with your body’s wisdom.
The first step is developing what’s called interoceptive awareness—the ability to notice and name what’s happening inside your body without judgment. This might sound simple, but for many trauma survivors, disconnection from bodily sensations served as a crucial survival mechanism. Reconnecting requires patience and support.
Practitioners at Boise Ketamine Clinic guide this process through preparation sessions before ketamine therapy begins. You learn to identify resources—memories, places, or sensations that help you feel grounded and safe. You practice pendulation, the skill of moving awareness between areas of tension and areas of relative ease in your body. These aren’t just coping techniques; they’re ways of teaching your nervous system that it has options beyond the all-or-nothing responses of fight, flight, or freeze.
During therapy sessions, you might notice sensations arising—perhaps tightness in your chest or tingling in your hands. Rather than pushing these away, you’re guided to stay with them, track them, and allow them to shift naturally. Often, when given space and attention, these sensations will move, change, or complete in ways that bring relief. This is your body finally discharging the energy that’s been held since the original trauma.
The clinic’s team includes clinical psychologists, licensed counselors, and energy workers alongside medical providers, reflecting an understanding that healing complex trauma requires multiple approaches. Results vary by individual, and recovery isn’t linear, but many clients report that working directly with bodily sensations creates breakthroughs that years of talk therapy alone couldn’t achieve.
Practical Steps You Can Take This Week
While comprehensive trauma treatment requires professional support, you can begin developing somatic awareness and nervous system regulation skills on your own.
Three accessible practices to start this week:
1. Body Scan Practice (5 minutes daily): Find a quiet moment and bring gentle attention to different parts of your body, starting with your feet and moving upward. Notice sensations without trying to change them. Where do you feel tension? Where do you feel ease? Simply observing these sensations, without judgment, begins to rebuild the connection between your conscious awareness and your body’s signals.
2. Grounding Through Sensation: When you notice the early signs of a triggered response, engage your senses deliberately. Place your feet firmly on the ground and press down, noticing the sensation. Hold a cold object or splash cold water on your face. Name five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch. These practices help bring you back to the present moment and signal safety to your nervous system.
3. Breath Regulation: Your breath is one of the few automatic processes you can consciously control, making it a bridge between your voluntary and involuntary nervous systems. Practice extending your exhale to be longer than your inhale (breathe in for 4 counts, out for 6). This activates the parasympathetic nervous system, helping signal to your body that you’re safe.
When to Seek Professional Support in Boise
If your body’s trauma responses significantly impact your daily functioning—affecting your relationships, work, or ability to feel safe—it’s time to consider professional support. Complex PTSD requires specialized treatment approaches, and not all providers have training in trauma-informed, body-based methods.
Signs that professional support would be beneficial include: frequent flashbacks or intrusive physical sensations, chronic hypervigilance that prevents rest or relaxation, avoidance of situations that trigger body responses, difficulty sleeping due to physical activation, relationship problems stemming from your body’s protective responses, or feelings of being disconnected from your body or emotions.
Boise Ketamine Clinic offers free 15-minute phone consultations to discuss whether their integrative approach might be appropriate for your situation. Their model combines medical expertise with therapeutic support—each ketamine-assisted therapy session includes a private room with a prescriber, registered nurse, and therapist working collaboratively. This team approach acknowledges that healing complex trauma requires attention to biological, psychological, and relational dimensions simultaneously.
The clinic has been providing ketamine sessions to Idaho residents longer than any other practice in the state. As a referral center for major Idaho hospitals, they’ve built credibility within the medical community while maintaining an approach that honors the body’s role in trauma and healing. They serve clients from across the Boise area, including Nampa and Emmett, with hours extending to Saturdays to accommodate working professionals.
Insurance considerations are important when planning treatment. While ketamine infusion therapy itself is not covered by insurance, the clinic’s sister company, Healing House, can bill insurance for portions of sessions that have billable codes, potentially reducing out-of-pocket costs by approximately $200 per session. A referral from your current therapist, counselor, or medical provider is required, and you’ll maintain regular contact with them throughout treatment—an approach that ensures comprehensive, coordinated care.
Your Body’s Wisdom Deserves Attention
The fact that your body reacts before your mind isn’t a malfunction—it’s your nervous system attempting to protect you based on past experiences. Understanding this body-first response is the first step toward healing. When you recognize that physical sensations aren’t random or irrational but rather your body communicating important information, you can begin working with rather than against your nervous system.
Complex trauma created these patterns through experience; new experiences of safety and completion can reshape them. Whether through somatic therapy, ketamine-assisted treatment, or other body-based approaches, healing is possible when you address trauma where it actually lives—in your nervous system and the felt sense of your body.
Your body has been carrying this burden for too long. It’s ready to learn new patterns of safety, connection, and ease. And with the right support, you can teach it that the threat has passed.